[00:00:00] Gary Fischer, PE: Okay, we’re ready on for our next one. Will Buie, there he is. So Will is also gonna report out on his capstone project. He is works for Creature. Where is the director of productivity will eliminates complexities and roadblocks that prevent employees from performing at their highest potential.
[00:00:24] Gary Fischer, PE: With over a decade at Creature Will has worked across every facet of his organization, managing projects using traditional and modular methods. Will over to you to tell us all about your project.
[00:00:36] Will Buie: Thanks Gary. Go ahead and share my screen and we’ll get started.
[00:00:41] Gary Fischer, PE: Okay.
[00:00:42] Will Buie: Good on your end.
[00:00:44] Gary Fischer, PE: It’s trying.
[00:00:44] Gary Fischer, PE: I see. Creature. Is that what you, yep, that’s it. That’s it. Okay. We got it. Awesome.
[00:00:50] Will Buie: Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for the opportunity to share where we’re at as a company. To give you an idea of where we’re going with the, presentation, I wanna talk about how creature is currently taking our production system and applying PPM.
[00:01:07] Will Buie: Methodologies and what we’ve learned in the classes over the past year and a half. But before we do that, just an idea of who CREATURE is. We are a vertically integrated design build firm. So that means we have architecture in house general contracting MEP trade, as well as some multi-skilled carpentry trades.
[00:01:26] Will Buie: We have historically done anything from adaptive reuse projects to office build outs to multifamily construction, and various other type of projects. Currently we are really focused in the healthcare world and bringing industrialized construction into healthcare via a modular approach. Since about 2021, we’ve really been building out a system by which we can really make our process.
[00:01:53] Will Buie: And are people more effective? We do this via several in-house built apps, some overall understanding of tax, principles, tax scheduling as well as other influences throughout there throughout the industry. About a year and a half ago, came across built to Fail, started seeing that PPM in general matches a lot of what we already did and gave some verbiage to what we were trying to put forward.
[00:02:21] Will Buie: Attended the class. The Texas a and m offered a year and a half ago back in May of 24, understood what production could mean in a PPM lens and, began using and applying some of those principles to our existing system to really refine it. You’ll see that today and you’ll see how we’ve applied the past year in the mastery class to a couple of our projects and our system in general.
[00:02:48] Will Buie: A little more about us and what we’re looking at and, what we do. As far as a company, our vision is to create an integrated building platform that seamlessly improves the lives of our employees and customers. Our employees come first, then our customers, and we’re building an integrated platform that does that.
[00:03:09] Will Buie: So you may ask, what is an integrated platform? Our integrated platform consists of a few different approaches to construction. As you see here, one of the first ones modular program management. We believe and I think a lot of people have covered it today, that the systems that we build and the efficiencies that we gain across one project need to be applied to multiple projects.
[00:03:33] Will Buie: And so we really approach a program level kind of build out. So we don’t really look at just one project and say, okay, that’s it. Let’s. On, but we really look at how can we take that one project efficiencies and lessons learned and apply them programmatically over a series of projects. So imagine if you’re a healthcare provider building out emergency departments across the southeast, and you build one, you build multiple.
[00:03:58] Will Buie: Kind of in the same vein, we’re taking the lessons learned in the production system that we designed for one, and expanding it across that whole project line. In addition to that, we have architectural design in-house. And so you’ll see that come up here in a little bit as we begin to apply our production system to our architects.
[00:04:15] Will Buie: We do site adapt, so from a greenfield all the way to full construction. So we’re running permit running understanding of codes and authority, having jurisdiction problems, those type things through our system. Typical general contracting. I mentioned it earlier, we’re really taking this modular approach.
[00:04:34] Will Buie: So whether it’s a volumetric modular that, that shows up on the job site. So imagine six different units showing up. We’re connecting them together, that builds a 6,000 square foot healthcare facility. We call that. Putting or connecting together, we call that stitching. And so that could be the volumetric approach, or it could be a modular bathroom being put into a traditional construction type environment.
[00:04:59] Will Buie: It could be a, head wall that’s the modular head wall that’s installed. But any of that effort of putting ’em together, we call that stitching. Really, focused and really talented and have a history of doing that over the past several years, both with subcontractors and as you see here, our MEP trade.
[00:05:17] Will Buie: So we have self-performed mechanical, electric. And plumbing in-house as well as multi-school carpentry, believing that if we stitch a unit together, if we have these self-performed trades, then also this maintenance idea of taking care of the project through the beginning, all the way to the end of its lifecycle.
[00:05:36] Will Buie: As you can imagine, having a platform like this really begs for understanding production and really under really trying to understand how we can make the whole system efficient. So we have what we call the creature production system, like I mentioned earlier. There’s a lot of things that, that come into that system.
[00:05:56] Will Buie: I wanna focus today really on, on how we’ve learned a lot and influenced our system from the PPM mindset and through PPI’s classes. But what is our system? How do we define it to our people, our system, is a tool that organizes our processes to allow our people to seamlessly transform components into a completed project.
[00:06:17] Will Buie: The system improves efficiency by breaking the project into clearly defined steps, optimizing for the whole instead of the parts, and providing clarity of priorities, duration, and cost of each work step. It’s a lot of words, but if I’m describing it to a new hire, there’s two things that I really hone in on.
[00:06:36] Will Buie: The first thing is that we’re breaking down the entirety of a building into the smallest steps possible. We call those work packages. It’s something that you guys are probably familiar with as well, and as far as the terminology, but that allows us to see the Q times, the different systems or the different.
[00:06:52] Will Buie: Issues with the work package, but really understand how that small Lego piece is affected by the building as a whole. In addition to that, the second thing that I really share with our new employees is, okay, we want, we are building a tool, not a rule. So what does that mean? If you have a nail, you don’t reach for a screwdriver to hit that nail.
[00:07:13] Will Buie: You reach for a hammer, and you do that because it’s the best tool for the job. So as we’re building a production system, as we’re sitting here in an office designing, by the way, by which the project is built, it has to be done in such a way that it’s the. Best thing for our employees so that our tradesmen in the field and our tradeswomen in the field pick up and use the tool, right?
[00:07:32] Will Buie: And so for a production system in general to be effective, it needs that constant feedback, that constant loop, not just from somebody sitting in an office, but somebody that’s actually inside of a system running the system. And so we believe that creating the right tool for our people really yields that result.
[00:07:50] Will Buie: You’ve seen a couple of different process maps before, but I wanna take you in the journey from the beginning of where we were at about a year and a half ago to where we are now and where we’re going in the future. Before we do that, just wanna make sure that we’re all on the same page with the visuals that you’ll see and so have here.
[00:08:09] Will Buie: What a, stock. Represents in, in, in the process map. And what, what is represented in q in the process map and what representing an operation in a process map? I think we all are on the same page, but just in case stock is something, a material that is waiting to be transformed or that is produced at the end of the production system.
[00:08:29] Will Buie: So both sides of the system. The queue is the set of wait time or, pieces between different operations. And then the operations is what’s act actively performing or transforming something. Inside the system. So as we started our production system here at Creature, mapping it out and understanding really what does it look like from a PPM lens and, how does it work?
[00:08:54] Will Buie: We began. Putting a map together. May of last year, me and four of the guys attended the introductory class. We called ourselves the Fab five, which we then proceeded to meet multiple times over several months to really argue, debate, and understand what is the current status of our production system at that point in time, and how can we really draw it out and map out all the complexities that existed within our system.
[00:09:24] Will Buie: As you can see it started small. I think that bottom thing we were writing chess or checkers and we were trying to decide which one we’re playing. But it’s a good history, just in this screenshot, what we ended up developing was a full production system for freestanding emergency department for one of our clients.
[00:09:43] Will Buie: Our clients. And so you can see this is a pretty complex system. It has on one side it has the stock and then the other side it has the kind of finishing stock. As you’re looking at the system as a whole, wanna really zoom in on this first part. This is everything that happens site work-wise. And so you see there’s a lot of complexity here as we talked about I think in, earlier sessions.
[00:10:07] Will Buie: But just to reiterate this is not about. Dates, it’s about rates. And so just because you see something vertically lined up doesn’t mean it happens all at the same time. What you do see is if it’s the left of a process that happens before the process that’s next to it, to the right, right?
[00:10:23] Will Buie: And so as you’re moving across this, platform or this. Process map of our production system, you begin to see that there’s complexity on one side of this central area, and there’s complexity on the other side of this central area. And with a central point just to hone in on it and make sure we’re, we understand, we understood this to be the volumetric modular set.
[00:10:44] Will Buie: And so this is where our volume volumetric modules are set on the job site. And we knew that we needed to get all this complexity that’s associated before the set and after the set. Really efficient and understand where the Q times existed in each of those systems. So this is where the kind of process map led us in general and then.
[00:11:07] Will Buie: What we did to create this map is we really looked at four or five different smaller processes. And so this is just a zoomed in portion of that, that, that full map as you see here. We began to then color code for our trades. So we had light blue for plumbing, dark blue from. The mechanical.
[00:11:26] Will Buie: We had orange for a multi-skilled green for our carpentry crew or green for our electrical crew. And as we’re, looking at this and trying to understand where do the complexities lie, how do we make this more efficient and, really, we didn’t think we would see as, large of a result just from mapping out.
[00:11:46] Will Buie: But as it turns out, when you begin to map out and to really show a production system and you understand where all of the different Q points are and where all the different complexity is humans, at least the humans that we have on our team begin to naturally make the system more efficient.
[00:12:05] Will Buie: And so we, we had these different systems as, we talked about, this was last year over the, course of about a year’s worth of work over three projects. We understood that our interior system was about 177 days. Our roof work system, 135, and then our electrical room system about 65 days.
[00:12:27] Will Buie: Again, this is. From our production system being mapped out, and then from us monitoring the actual work that was occurring in each of these different parts. From fa, from project one to project two, a little bit of an improvement in the interior system, massive improvement in the roof system. And then as you look into, okay, project one to two to three, you can see that we were beginning to understand.
[00:12:52] Will Buie: Where the queue times were, where the inefficiencies were where the bottlenecks were because we knew what the system looked like and we knew that everything that came before and after different work processes, right? What we, realized over these three projects in less than a year’s time was a 23% increase in speed to delivery, or 23% reduction in the overall cycle time of the project.
[00:13:18] Will Buie: And pretty powerful just from. Simple mapping out showing our production system and understanding kind of the connection points between our different work packages. Then attended the class over the past year with Texas a and m, understanding more about the kind of PPM methodology, understanding about controls and applying controls to the project and, how that might yield and lead to more results.
[00:13:44] Will Buie: And so we took our system and we began to really hone in on different parts of the system. Take the whole part, zoom in, in something that we can really focus in on for us with plumbing. Specifically looking at the underground plumbing or what we call the underground and under Uber plumbing.
[00:14:01] Will Buie: Trying to figure out where are the connection points within the system and where are the bottlenecks, where the things that are, more efficient than others? How do we really increase the cycle time of this? Particular portion without adding more resources. We all know that adding more resources is not the right answer or is very seldom the right answer.
[00:14:21] Will Buie: In this case, we came across the, same realizations use the SPS. System to begin to map the relationships and begin to track and understand if someone committed to something and they didn’t perform, what was happening, what were the, factors that were leading to that, where’s the variability in the system so we could begin attacking and head on.
[00:14:44] Will Buie: And as we began to do this we realize some more production, what we focus on, production rate increases. It’s one of the things that we measure that allow for us to really. Reduce the cycle time and reduce the complexed. Our project. So with across three projects, and this is over the past six months just in this underground portion and under Uber kind of stitch portion a 57% increase in our production rate for underground trenching we see a 28% increase in our underground plumbing.
[00:15:18] Will Buie: In our production rate and a 49% under plumbing stitch in totality, if you look at just this phase, we’re able to reduce the cycle time by 60% just by applying some controls to the project, to our people, and to understanding all the variability in the system and reducing it. But we’re really excited about, and I wish I had some data to show, but we’re not fully complete over three projects.
[00:15:42] Will Buie: I think the interior of the system is gonna be pretty impacted by the, implementation of these controls as well. You can see here we have a 92.7% improvement in just one of our processes over two projects. And so if that continues to show over three and then the whole production system for the interior net, some of that same increase in production and we believe that we’ll have an in decrease in the cycle time as well and an increase in the throughput.
[00:16:12] Will Buie: And pretty, powerful result just from the past year and a half, understanding what our production system was in general, and then applying controls using a lot of the software that, that you’ve seen today and people have talked about today. And the principles of PPM and just understanding what it looks like to not just manage a project, but to really focus in on a project’s production and, really control the production of a project.
[00:16:40] Will Buie: Didn’t wanna stop there. As I mentioned earlier, we have architects in house and as everybody knows, UHS are really fun to work with and they really love to be told when to produce something and be put in a production system. So went to our chief design officer and said, Hey. I need help building the production system for the architecture.
[00:16:59] Will Buie: I wanna apply some of the same principles that we’ve applied to our construction team, to our architecture team and design and then bring in engineers and really understand. Then went home four or five days later. This is what he produced. His idea of a production system what he was trying to communicate and, visually show is that the green would be what we would call stock.
[00:17:23] Will Buie: And then in between that he had a mixture of q time and processes and different things that he was showing as what a production system could be for design. I took that and began applying. Again, same process map began applying and taking what, he was calling his vertical stock or his green, and then really converting it to what the system could understand mathematically, because it’s one thing to draw it visually.
[00:17:49] Will Buie: It’s another thing to understand the mathematics behind it. We’re in this phase right now where we’re optimizing for our design team and trying to understand how many designers should be working on which projects. Trying to understand what the throughput of our design team is. Trying to understand really what.
[00:18:10] Will Buie: How many drawings our designers can produce in a given amount of time, and then be able to take that information and apply it specifically to projects. Not to work our designers harder, but to take care and care about them as people. As we’ve begun to do this, we’re honing in on what our optimal throughput should be, what our predicted throughput could be really what the demand of the system is per project or not.
[00:18:35] Will Buie: I’m really gonna dive into the full numbers yet because we’re still trying to hone in on what this looks like. But just the fact that we went from that original green and, white drawing, that really is just an idea of a mind map to already in a short time having realistic numbers of what our production system and design could hold and what it could be.
[00:18:58] Will Buie: As you can see here, just with the numbers that we’re showing, we look to be. Pretty underutilized. And so we’ve gotta understand did I, model something wrong? Are we actually underutilized? What do we need to do as we begin to build out that system? So that’s just what the next couple of weeks and next couple of months holds for us, but really excited that if we can apply the same controls process to our designers as we did to our construction team of what the future holds for us.
[00:19:27] Will Buie: So why does this matter to creature? Why would it matter to you guys? I, mentioned earlier our platform. As you look at our platform, we realize that what you actually needed to make our platform really effective is the production system. And so we have a production system that begins to connect everything from our program management side through architecture, through site.
[00:19:49] Will Buie: General contracting, our stitching, our MEP and back to our kind of maintenance side. Everything at Creature Now is informed and run through our production system and will continue to be optimized by our production system. Again, not because I wanna work people harder or not, because I believe we should work faster.
[00:20:09] Will Buie: But if you go back to our vision, we want to create an integrated building platform that seamlessly improves the lives of our employees and our customers. I think we’ve touched on it some today, but the real win in a production system in my mind is giving the people that build the projects stability.
[00:20:28] Will Buie: If I can tell them when something is gonna happen and be pretty confident. In fact, almost. A hundred percent confident that it’s going to happen the day that we say it’s gonna happen. Imagine a world in which our tradesmen and tradeswomen can plan their lives around. Not the firefighting that exists in construction today, but in a, system that is very much modeled.
[00:20:50] Will Buie: After a manufacturing platform, right? So an industrialized world in which we know when work packages or processes should happen, and we know what can influence the actual implementation of the system. And so that’s, why we’re doing it. That’s why I think everybody that’s, watched today is doing it.
[00:21:06] Will Buie: And excited to continue to build that, not just for the feel but also for our designers as well. I have if you have any questions, I included my contact information here and then obviously we’re able to take any questions now.
[00:21:23] Gary Fischer, PE: All right. That was impressive results. For those who stuck around for the whole day, they got a real treat here right at the end.
[00:21:33] Gary Fischer, PE: We that was, exceptional. That was really good. See those kind of results, that’s so powerful. I’m not surprised lived it myself, but it’s really exciting to see you adopt it and really form your whole company around that model. That’s really good stuff.
[00:21:50] Will Buie: Yeah. Thanks.
[00:21:51] Gary Fischer, PE: All right, so any questions before we do a wrap up?
[00:21:58] Gary Fischer, PE: And everybody just got bashful or something here.
[00:22:05] Gary Fischer, PE: Okay. Could you share the estimated value of the performance gains you cited across the subject projects?
[00:22:15] Will Buie: I don’t have those readily available. We can look. We have on our website for the first set of projects that I talked about and we have a white paper published that shows the kind of increase there.
[00:22:26] Will Buie: So you could go to our website and see the, thing that we focus on in addition to economic gain or money increases is really the efficiency, right? And so that, that number matters to us. More than the, number gang there. But we do have those numbers on our website.
[00:22:50] Gary Fischer, PE: So when you started this journey, what surprised you?
[00:22:54] Gary Fischer, PE: I.
[00:22:55] Will Buie: That’s a good question. I think the eagerness of our team to adapt and to lean into production, right? And so my fear was that we would build a system and then people would laugh at it and say, okay what’s the point of that? What we, realized is that our tradespeople, and I think tradespeople in general just want to do a great job.
[00:23:17] Will Buie: And if you provide them with a tool that shows. Them doing a great job and it’s, constant interactive feedback, then they’re compelled to do better and compelled to care more versus the world that’s traditionally existed where they just work and they don’t know if they’re doing well and then four weeks later they’re told, they’re behind.
[00:23:36] Will Buie: Hey, you’re behind. You gotta work harder.
[00:23:38] Gary Fischer, PE: Just gets pushed to ’em. Yeah. Yep. So the, a good question here, you mentioned the several months to map the overall process. How many hours did it actually take to complete the map?
[00:23:49] Will Buie: I don’t, think anybody wants to measure that. The completion of the map wasn’t the hard part.
[00:23:56] Will Buie: The hard part was what did, what? Is the actual reality of our system, right? And so we, I drew one version of the map after about two weeks and built it in the system. Thought I had it, printed it out. It was great. It was gonna be it, we were gonna be done, we were gonna go home, showed it to the group and nobody agreed with it.
[00:24:20] Will Buie: And so we wadd it out, threw it away, started over, and it was really. Because the map itself is not the secret sauce. The secret sauce is understanding the connections between the processes the different stock points the queue times, and really the queue is what matters. And that’s what I think we lose in a traditional scheduling.
[00:24:41] Will Buie: Methodology, right? You don’t understand where the queue is and you just miss it. You’re like, oh, that took a long time. No, the process was really quick. It’s that queue time that matters, right? And so that’s where we got, we fought discussed a lot. What was the queue time? Where does it exist in the system?
[00:24:59] Will Buie: And that’s where it really took a lot of time.
[00:25:01] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. And that’s one thing that I personally found is there was always far more complexity in a workflow than anybody ever imagined there was. It’s wow, I didn’t know that. For sure. Sounds like you discovered the same thing from your first example there to where you ended up.
[00:25:17] Gary Fischer, PE: That’s really good stuff. Let’s see, any other questions here? Looks like maybe we’re running outta gas. That wa that was really good. Will thank you for that. And we look forward to seeing more from you down the road As your model matures and you start managing whip and variability and all those kinds of things, it’ll be exciting to see.
[00:25:39] Gary Fischer, PE: Yep. Alright. Thank you. Thank you.
